Today, in a blog series on sharing the Q&A from the Oracle Enterprise Management Forum, we'll cover the Q&A from the "Managing the World's #1 Middleware" session in the DBA/ Developer track.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is the #1 application infrastructure foundation available today. It enables enterprises to create and run agile, intelligent business applications while maximizing IT efficiency through full utilization of modern hardware and software architectures. Oracle Enterprise Manager is the most complete and integrated availability and performance monitoring for Fusion Middleware and delivers unique capabilities such as production diagnostics, model-driven topology mapping and business transaction management.

With the introduction of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c we continue to drive down the Total cost of ownership of our middleware solutions through introduction of new automation capabilities.

Firstly, we have automated some of the most common tasks in monitoring a Middleware environment.

Most of you will view the dependency between components, navigate across them, and look for occurrence of related incidents or performance problems between them. You can now do these activities very simply through our Routing Topology Viewer. Enterprise Manager is also continuously monitoring log files for occurrence of any exceptions or errors. Our Log viewer allows you to search log files across components even if they are spread across WLS domains.

Secondly we have added some unique capabilities for Diagnostic automation.

Now many of you may already be familiar with the Diagnostic Advisors we have built for the Oracle Database. We, for the first time in the industry, are now offering similar capabilities for the WebLogic Server tier as well. Just like the Database, the Middleware Diagnostic Advisor analyzes an hours worth of performance data and generate performance findings every hour. There are recommendations associated with each of the findings that can help you tune your application performance. Currently there are 6 types of findings we generate and we will continue to add to this list in each upcoming release.

Finally, we continue to deliver on new capabilities for provisioning automation

As you know, provisioning activities can sometimes consume 40-50% of a typical administrators time, and we want to help optimize this so that this time can be spent on more value added activities. One of the key new capabilities in Enterprise Manager 12c is automation capabilities for scaling WebLogic Server and SOA domains, as well as automation for deployment and Java EE applications

With Enterprise Manager 12c we are confident that unprecedented levels of automation we offer will be extremely valuable to the Fusion Middleware admin community

A. Enterprise Manager provides complete apps to disk management for Exalogic though the Exalogic Dashboard providing a unified view of hardware and software assets. Furthermore, Enterprise Manager 12c provides visibility into hardware assets by communicating to the integrated lights out management card, or service processor. Consequently, Enterprise Manager has visibility into the compute nodes, switches and storage on Exalogic hardware.

Q. Does EM12c contains a new version of ADP(aka Clearapp) also?

A. ADP has been integrated into the EM12c console, providing a single pane of glass for ADP across WLS instances.

Q. Enterprise Manager 12c has a new look and feel, are there any changes under the hood?

A. Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (12c) has a new modular plug-in architecture that allows for a more flexible product life-cycle. As a consequence, new middleware management release features can be downloaded directly into Enterprise Manager 12c and new functionality can be pushed down to the EM agent. Furthermore, Enterprise Manager’s new architecture scales to meet the largest customer deployments of Fusion Middleware and Weblogic domains.

Q. What is new in Enterprise Manager Enterprise Manager 12c for Middleware?

A. Enterprise Manager 12c builds upon 11g release in a number of significant ways. This includes tighter integration with Enterprise Manager Ops Center for Hardware Management (networking, storage, compute nodes). Additionally, EM12c provides the ability to clone and scale out Fusion Middleware Containers and WLS containers with Java Required Files. And lastly, the Exalogic Dashboard has been improved with simplified discovery and a new look and feel.

Q. What is the difference between WLS Console, Fusion Middleware Control, and Enterprise Manager Cloud Control?

A. The WLS Console is converging with Fusion Middleware Control Console over time and ultimately provides a single console for Weblogic and Fusion Middleware management. The end goal is for Fusion Middleware Console to contain the functionality of the Weblogic console, plus provide extended console management services for the Fusion Middleware stack.

Q. Is there any overlap with Fusion Middleware Control Enterprise Manager Cloud Control?

A. Enterprise Manager Cloud Control works hand-in-hand with Fusion Middleware Control. EM12c and Fusion Middlware Control acts as a single pane of glass allowing you to manage all your Weblogic and Fusion Middleware Domains from a single console. In addition to the configuration capabilities of Fusion Middleware Control, Enterprise Manager Cloud Control provides services to those middleware instances including: deployment, cloning/scaling, testing, configuration management, diagnostics, service level management, patch automation and cloud management services - all from that single console.

Q. Can Enterprise Manager Cloud Control manage the tight integration of Coherence and Weblogic?

A. Yes, Enterprise Manager Cloud Control has Coherence management capabilities and can monitor and manage both weblogic and Coherence. For Coherence Enterprise Manager Cloud Control provides deployment, cloning/scaling, configuration management, diagnostics, service level management, patch automation and cloud management services, all from the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control console.

Q. Hanging off a previous Q - When would you need WLS/FMw Console over EM Cloud Console?

A. Enterprise Manager Cloud Console provides a greater number of services than WLS/FMW Console providing a single pane of glass for enterprise management. For example, in addition to the configuration capabilities of Fusion Middleware Control, Enterprise Manager Cloud Control provides services to those middleware instances including: deployment, cloning/scaling, testing, configuration management, diagnostics, service level management, patch automation and cloud management services - all from that single console.

Q. Does Exalogic system run Database servers as well (as app servers etc.)? Thought I saw something along the lines from a slide in another session.

A. Yes, Exalogic can run database servers, however, as a best practice Exalogic is best paired with Exadata from a performance and high availability standpoint.